Watch Dogs Gets First round of DLC and Not Much Changed

Watch_Dogs, the title that brought us the ability to hack into people’s bank accounts and set us out to take down an entire system, comes back with new content. Not all of it really changes things much.

Ubisoft Montreal gave us the brilliant idea of being a hacker in their release of Watch Dogs back in May. The time has come for some DLC to come our way, some had hopes for the better, and those hopes were made real in a roundabout way.

The new DLC, Bad Blood, puts us in the shoes of aged hacker and designer of the “ctOS” system in the game’s main campaign, Raymond “T-Bone” Kenney. As far as most gamers are concerned it is a step in the right direction, as it is a step away from the title’s main character, Aiden Pearce. Pearce was said to be without a personality and was disliked by the fans for being such. Now with T-Bone, you get a fleshed out and more personable character to run around with in the big city.

In the original story, you meet up with T-Bone about midway through the game. This beer drinking, grizzled hacker’s 10 mission story picks up right where he left off when you last saw him in Watch Dogs, setting out to plant a false trail in the ctOS systems so he can go off the grid for good. As you can expect, his plans go a bit awry when an old friend calls him and asks for his help. The story takes off from there, delving into missions in order to help your friend and will lead you into a lot more trouble than you were anticipating.

Coming along for the ride is a new companion, Eugene, a fancy RC Car that has many of the same abilities T-Bone has, including an on board taser, as well as the ability to fit inside of air ducts and explode near groups of enemies to make your task easier. While this does bring in a new set of mini game like moments to the game, allowing you to sneak into a building, keeping you safe while disabling security features your character can’t do himself, it doesn’t extend much further than that.

Aside from a new character with personality and an interesting new Toy with Eugene, the DLC does bring with it new co-op missions, dubbed “Street Sweep”. Mirroring the “Gang Hideout” missions from the main game, these new missions can be played with a partner or alone, allowing you to coordinate attack plans, strategies, and so forth. These missions now have added primary and secondary objectives to complete, such as finding three targets and non-lethally take them out while not being noticed. This brings a new sense of challenge to the missions, which was missing in the original side missions. Along with these missions comes an online leader board which you can compete against other players for top billing in specific maps. These maps randomize every 30 minutes, so it leads me to believe there will be a lot of interesting ways to get on the board.

This being said, the new DLC Bad Blood offers some new things, if not just a slight spin from what was originally handed to us in the main story release of Watch Dogs. A new set of eyes with a new personality, new toys, and some new co-op missions with a ranking system; this is the basis of the new DLC. While not much can be expected out of a downloadable release, it has become a sad norm that only small add-ons are given these days. At least gamers will have a few more reasons to step back into Chicago on September 20th.